https://twitter.com/ruslantrad/status/1488073033986289669
https://twitter.com/DavidWCochrane/status/1488117497354145794
based
6min video here
https://trmlx.com/vaccine-injuries-in-the-dod-and-the-attempted-cover-up/
https://pastebin.com/mBFzBmGT
Testimony Before Congress (starts at 4:52:50): https://rumble.com/vt62y6-covid-19-a-second-opinion.html
DoD DMED Database (source of screenshots, and requires login)
https://www.afhsc.mil/POA/account/Login#!
https://twitter.com/TerraSolis17/status/1487809771340185606
https://twitter.com/disclosetv/status/1488163876780888067?s=21
https://twitter.com/DiscloseTV
https://twitter.com/JustinTrudeau/status/1488162322187182085
HIDDEN from voters, Hunter Biden's JP Morgan financials subpoenaed over a year before election.
The subpoena was issued by Delaware’s US Attorney David Weiss on May 15, 2019. At the time, Hunter’s father, Joe Biden, was a presidential candidate.
The subpoena was issued just five weeks after Hunter allegedly left his laptop in a Delaware repair shop. A total of 15 businesses owned by Hunter and his associates were listed on the legal document.
The Justice Department investigation into Hunter Biden began in 2018 but was never disclosed before the election. A month after the election, in December 2020, Hunter announced that the US Attorney’s Office in Delaware was “investigating my tax affairs.” Also under investigation were Hunter’s foreign business dealings.
In the weeks before the election, then-Attorney General William Barr reportedly instructed prosecutors to keep the investigation hush-hush to avoid it becoming a campaign issue. But months earlier, in the summer of 2020, Weiss already had decided to slow-walk the investigation until after the election for similar reasons, according to Politico.
https://nypost.com/2022/01/30/hunter-biden-and-associates-received-2019-subpoena-over-business-deals-in-china/
Truth Behind FDA/Pfizer Attempts to Stop Public From Seeing Their COVID ‘Vaccine’ Data For 55 Years
JANUARY 30, 2022
Pregnancy loss rate of those jabbed early on was 87.5%
It took court action and Freedom of Information (FOIA) requests to prevent the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) from attempting to keep COVID data sealed until 2076.
The FDA worked with our own Justice Department lawyers and at least one case, Pfizer, to prevent any such knowledge to be acquired by public for 55 years.
After two years of the COVID pandemic, most Americans now know that public health agencies and scientists have been manipulating data to protect pharmaceutical interests rather than the citizens they exist to serve.
For certain, numerous cases of stillborn babies, hemorrhages, and miscarriages are linked to the experimental Big Pharma injections
Ontario, Canada mother Chané Neveling indicated she “just had my baby girl in July [and] the amount or pressure I felt from my doctors to get the [vaccine] while pregnant almost made me go against my morals and I almost got it. My OBGYN’s exact words to me were ‘you are stupid for not getting it. You will die in ICU.’”
The World Health Organization’s VigiBase reported these pregnancy complications in the same time frame:
4,024 spontaneous abortions
354 foetal deaths
199 missed abortions
172 premature labours
170 premature babies
164 abortions
155 slow movement of unborn baby
151 hemorrhages in pregnancy
143 premature deliveries
128 fetal growth restriction
124 stillbirths
115 ectopic pregnancies
96 pre-eclampsia
https://cleverjourneys.wordpress.com/2022/01/30/truth-behind-fda-pfizer-attempts-to-stop-public-from-seeing-their-covid-vaccine-data-for-55-years/
https://www.thestar.com/politics/political-opinion/2022/01/30/holding-a-mass-temper-tantrum-in-ottawa-disguised-as-a-street-party-wont-end-the-pandemic.html
https://www.npr.org/2022/01/31/1076873172/one-in-four-americans-say-violence-against-the-government-is-sometimes-okay
npr.org
1 in 4 Americans say violence against the government is sometimes OK
Matthew S. Schwartz Twitter
6-8 minutes
In this file photo, supporters of President Donald Trump climb the west wall of the the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. A new survey finds 1 in 10 Americans say violent protests are justified. Jose Luis Magana/AP hide caption
toggle caption
Jose Luis Magana/AP
In this file photo, supporters of President Donald Trump climb the west wall of the the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. A new survey finds 1 in 10 Americans say violent protests are justified.
Jose Luis Magana/AP
Nearly a quarter of Americans say it's sometimes OK to use violence against the government — and one in 10 Americans say violence is justified "right now."
That's the finding of a new report by The COVID States Project, which asked 23,000 people across the country whether it is "ever justifiable to engage in violent protest against the government?" The report is one of several in recent months that find people more likely to contemplate violent protests than they had been in the past.
Nearly 1 in 4 said violence was either "definitely" or "probably" justifiable against the government. A similar percentage of liberals and conservatives agree on this point.
That's not surprising when you think about how American history is taught, said COVID States Project co-director David Lazer.
"You know, we begin with the American Revolution against an illegitimate government and so we are, in a sense, taught from grade school that it is at some points in history justifiable to engage in violent protest," he said.
The COVID States Project typically asks questions about Americans' COVID-related policy preferences and behaviors — whether they understand what kinds of masks are better at filtering viral particles, for instance, or what they think about vaccine mandates. But in the current political climate, COVID questions aren't too far-removed from questions about violence, Lazer said.
"Before the election in 2020, we were looking at both beliefs around the anticipated legitimacy of the election, as well as things like vote modality — because obviously how people voted was determined in part by COVID," he said. "We see it all in part as a package with what has happened over the last two years to American society."
The survey also found that 1 in 10 Americans say violence is justified right now. Republicans and ideological conservatives are most likely to say violent protest against the government is justifiable right now, the report found. Among Republican men, the figure rises to nearly 1 in 5.
Two-thirds of those who believe violent protest is justified say the federal government is an appropriate target; about one-third direct their ire at state governments.
"Unfortunately, these survey findings are not at all surprising," said Rachel Kleinfeld, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Kleinfeld, who was not involved in the survey, says the findings are consistent with other recent polling.
Last year, a University of Chicago poll found almost 1 in 10 Americans believed the use of force was justified to restore Trump to the presidency after he lost. And in December, the Washington Post and University of Maryland together found that 1 in 3 Americans think violence against the government is sometimes justified.
The number of Americans who support violent political protests have doubled over the last decade, she said. And to Kleinfeld, these poll results reflect more than just philosophizing.
"It's moved from the sphere of chest thumping into the sphere of reality, and it's affecting election workers, volunteer poll workers, school boards, you know, really the kind of warp and weft of our democratic system," she said.
The government needs to hold citizens to account, says Kleinfeld: Not just those who would storm the Capitol, but anyone who threatens the workers that keep our democracy running.
Polls can overstate potential for violence, some researchers say
But some researchers, who weren't involved in conducting the survey, worry that the findings — while provocative — may overstate American support for political violence. Sean Westwood, a professor of government at Dartmouth College, is working on a paper that tries to correct for the errors in measurement that exist when people are questioned about political violence.
"When trying to measure violence, there's this tendency to try to be as general as possible to try and capture as much support as possible," Westwood said. And people who are indifferent — who haven't thought much about political violence or protests — may randomly pick between the options, which could lead to an over-counting of people who support political violence, he said.
Moreover, the survey questions don't capture context, Westwood said.
"There are a lot of instances we can think of where violent protests against the government could very well be justified," he said, pointing to the Warsaw Ghetto riots against the Nazis, or the civil rights movement in the U.S. "And that is going to vary quite dramatically from what we saw on Jan. 6."
Yet, both scenarios would be captured in the survey question.
"So it's really impossible, in the set up, to know what respondents are agreeing to," Westwood said.
Christian Davenport, a professor at the University of Michigan and a research professor at the Peace Research Institute Oslo, is similarly circumspect. While the numbers are "not especially surprising," Davenport said he's "not a fan of the use of polls exclusively" to determine a populace's potential for violence.
"Individuals will say a great number of things on a poll," he said, "but never show up for anything."
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/watch-us-russia-square-rare-un-security-council-debate
zerohedge.com
Watch Live: US & Russia Square Off In Rare UN Security Council Debate
by Tyler Durden
3 minutes
The UN Security Council in New York is set to meet at 10am EST after the US demanded that Moscow "explain itself" over what Washington has for weeks asserted is "imminent" plans to "invade" Ukraine.
"Our voices are unified in calling for the Russians to explain themselves," Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield told the US Sunday news shows. "We’re going into the room prepared to listen to them, but we’re not going to be distracted by their propaganda."
But voices aren't exactly "unified" on the 15-member council, given especially China's stance. Lately Beijing has issued rare condemnation of NATO's history of expansion and has called for calm.
China's Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian told reporters late last week that "China and Russia see each other as a priority in our respective diplomacy. There is no ceiling to China-Russia mutual trust, no forbidden zone in our strategic cooperation and no limit on how far our longstanding friendship can go."
Russia has denounced Monday's meeting as a "shameful public-relations stunt" orchestrated by the US:
“I can’t recall another occasion when a SC member proposed to discuss its own baseless allegations and assumptions as a threat to intl order from someone else,” wrote Dmitry Polyanski, Russia’s first deputy permanent representative to the U.N., Friday on Twitter.
WATCH THE MEETING LIVE HERE:
Moscow is expected to for the first time lay out its case condemning NATO's eastward expansion, which threatens Russia's security, before a large Western and global audience.
As The Wall Street Journal points out Monday, the debate could also serve as a barometer gauging Western allies' appetite for imposing extensive sanctions or even military action…
"In addition to Russia, China and other countries often oppose U.S. priorities at the U.N. A former U.S. ambassador to the U.N. said Thursday that a challenge on the Security Council is accurately calculating the extent of support for the U.S. position among other members, especially on this kind of sensitive issue," WSJ observes.
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Joe Rogan is cucking
Joe Rogan apologizes to Spotify and musicians amid boycott over his podcast
cnbc.com
Joe Rogan apologizes to Spotify and musicians amid boycott over his podcast
Jessica Bursztynsky
10-12 minutes
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https://www.voanews.com/a/north-korea-confirms-longest-range-missile-test-since-2017-/6419630.html
North Korea Confirms Longest-range Missile Test Since 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/31/us/trump-fbi-georgia.html
nytimes.com
Georgia Prosecutor Investigating Trump Seeks Safety Assistance From the F.B.I.
Richard Fausset
3-4 minutes
The Fulton County district attorney expressed concern about the former president’s comments at a rally in Texas.
At a rally in Texas, former President Donald J. Trump said he hoped that supporters would launch protests in Atlanta and New York, where he is facing civil and criminal investigations, if prosecutors do anything “wrong or illegal.”
Credit…Meridith Kohut for The New York Times
Jan. 31, 2022Updated 10:41 a.m. ET
ATLANTA — The district attorney in Fulton County, Ga., who is conducting a criminal investigation of former President Donald J. Trump has asked for an F.B.I. risk assessment of the county courthouse in downtown Atlanta, citing “alarming” rhetoric used by Mr. Trump at a rally in Texas over the weekend.
The Fulton County prosecutor, Fani T. Willis, is planning to impanel a special grand jury in May to look into accusations that Mr. Trump and his allies tried to improperly influence the outcome of the 2020 presidential election in Georgia. Among other things, the investigation is looking into a call that Mr. Trump made to Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, to pressure him to “find 11,780 votes” — the margin by which Mr. Trump lost the state.
Ms. Willis, a Democrat, made her request for a security assessment in a letter on Sunday to J.C. Hacker, the special agent in charge of the F.B.I.’s Atlanta field office. Ms. Willis said that she and her staff had “already made adjustments to accommodate security concerns during the course of the investigation, considering the communications we have received from persons unhappy with our commitment to fulfill our duties.”
But she also noted that Mr. Trump, at his rally in Conroe, Texas, on Saturday, made “multiple references to investigations that are known to concern his activities.” Ms. Willis’s request to the F.B.I. was reported earlier by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
At the rally, Mr. Trump said he would consider, if re-elected in 2024, pardoning people prosecuted for the attack on the National Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and told supporters to launch protests in Atlanta and New York — where he is also facing civil and criminal investigations of his business — if prosecutors “do anything wrong.”
Image
Credit…Nicole Craine for The New York Times
Ms. Willis noted that Mr. Trump told the crowd, “If these radical, vicious racist prosecutors do anything wrong or illegal, I hope we are going to have in this country the biggest protests we have ever had in Washington, D.C., in New York, in Atlanta and elsewhere because our country and our elections are corrupt.”
She also noted that Mr. Trump said the investigations involved “prosecutorial misconduct,” and said the prosecutors involved were “vicious horrible people. They’re racist and they’re very sick. They’re mentally sick.”
Ms. Willis is African-American, as are Letitia James, the New York attorney general who is conducting a civil investigation of Mr. Trump, and Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, who inherited the criminal inquiry in New York from his predecessor, Cyrus R. Vance, Jr., who is white.
Ms. Willis said the rhetoric was “more alarming” in light of Mr. Trump raising the possibility of pardoning the Jan. 6 protesters.
“We must work together to keep the public safe and ensure that we do not have a tragedy in Atlanta similar to what happened at the United States Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021,” Ms. Willis wrote.
https://www.rt.com/news/547842-biden-supreme-court-black-poll/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=RSS
rt.com
Americans don’t want Biden focused on race or gender of Supreme Court nominee – poll
2-3 minutes
Joe Biden’s promise to nominate a black woman to the Supreme Court has been met with accusations of politicization
A new ABC News/Ipsos poll has found a majority of Americans disapprove of President Joe Biden’s pledge to nominate a black woman to the Supreme Court, with most saying they want him to consider “all possible nominees.”
The survey, conducted days after Justice Stephen G. Breyer announced his retirement, found 76% of respondents would prefer Biden reviewed “all possible nominees,” rather than keep to his promise to find the most qualified black woman – a pledge he made during the 2020 presidential election campaign.
If Biden makes good on his promise, it would mark the first time a black woman had presided over the Supreme Court. However, Americans seem less focused on the nominee’s race than their president, with only 23% saying they want him to stick to his pledge. Biden recommitted to it during a recent event honoring Breyer.
“It’s long overdue, in my view. I made that commitment during the campaign for president, and I will keep that commitment,” he said.
Even among Democrats, a majority believe Biden should consider all possible nominees without narrowing his scope. Over half say they want him to consider all nominees, while 46% approve of his mission to place the first black female judge in the position.
Biden’s opportunity to nominate a Supreme Court judge follows former President Donald Trump’s nominations of Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett – appointments that upset liberal activists concerned that too many conservative choices were headed to the Supreme Court. The US’ highest jurisdiction is currently split 6-3, with conservative judges in the majority.
While judges are supposed to preside over cases without political bias, many believe they rule “on the basis of their partisan political views,” according to the new poll. Nearly half of all respondents believe political views fuel judges’ decisions, while fewer than 40% believe they rule strictly “on the basis of law.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/29/world/middleeast/isis-syria-iraq.html
nytimes.com
ISIS Siege of Syria Prison Proves It's Still a Threat
Ben Hubbard
8-11 minutes
ISIS, Thriving in Unstable Places, Proves It’s Still a Threat
The Islamic State may no longer be able to control territory, but it has shown in Syria and Iraq that it can still pull off opportunistic military operations.
Kurdish militia fighters warming themselves on Friday near a prison in Hasaka, Syria, that Islamic State fighters had attacked.
Credit…Diego Ibarra Sanchez for The New York Times
Published Jan. 29, 2022Updated Jan. 31, 2022, 3:29 a.m. ET
BEIRUT, Lebanon — One week after Islamic State fighters attacked a prison in northeastern Syria, where they have held out despite a heavy assault by a Kurdish-led militia backed by the United States, the terrorist organization published its version of what had gone down.
In its official magazine, it mocked how many times in its history its foes had declared the Islamic State to be defeated. Its surprise attack on the prison, it crowed, had made its enemies “shout in frustration: ‘They have returned again!’”
That description was not entirely wrong.
The battle for the prison, in the city of Hasaka, killed hundreds of people, drew in U.S. troops and offered a stark reminder that three years after the collapse of the Islamic State’s so-called caliphate, the group’s ability to sow chaotic violence persists, experts said. On Saturday, about 60 ISIS fighters still controlled part of the prison.
Image
Credit…Diego Ibarra Sanchez for The New York Times
In Iraq, ISIS recently killed 10 soldiers and an officer at an army post and beheaded a police officer on camera. In Syria, it has assassinated scores of local leaders, and it extorts businesses to finance its operations. In Afghanistan, the withdrawal of American forces in August has left it to battle the Taliban, with often disastrous consequences for the civilians caught in the middle.
The Islamic State, which once controlled territory the size of Britain that spanned the Syria-Iraq border, is not as powerful as it once was, but experts say it could be biding its time until conditions in the unstable countries where it thrives provide it with new chances to expand.
“There is no U.S. endgame in either Syria or Iraq, and the prison is just one example of this failure to work toward a long-term solution,” said Craig Whiteside, an associate professor at the U.S. Naval War College who studies the group. “It really is just a matter of time for ISIS before another opportunity presents itself. All they have to do is to hang on until then.”
The Islamic State, whose history goes back to the insurgency following the United States’ invasion of Iraq in 2003, reached the summit of its powers around 2015, when it ruled multiple cities in Syria and Iraq, attracted droves of foreign fighters from as far away as China and Australia, and ran a sophisticated propaganda machine that inspired or directed foreign attacks from Berlin to San Bernardino, Calif.
A military coalition led by the United States partnered with local forces in Syria and Iraq to roll it back, until a Kurdish-led militia, the Syrian Democratic Forces, pushed it from its last patch of territory in early 2019.
Image
Credit…Diego Ibarra Sanchez for The New York Times
Since then, the organization has morphed from a top-down, military-style bureaucracy to a more diffuse and decentralized insurgency, according to terrorism experts and regional security officials.
But the importance of the prison as a target suggested that last week’s attack would have been green lit “by the highest levels,” Mr. Whiteside said. The group’s ability to mobilize dozens of fighters and break into a prison that American and S.D.F. officials long suspected was a target was an achievement and a propaganda coup no matter how the siege turns out.
A senior American official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said the probable goal of the operation was to free some of the group’s senior or midlevel leaders and fighters with specific skills, like bomb-making. The official estimated that perhaps 200 prisoners had escaped.
S.D.F. officials have not confirmed that number and said they were still assessing the effect.
The Islamic State has struggled to rebuild. The killing of its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, in October 2019 deprived it of a unifying figure, and its new leader, Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi, is largely unknown. Tighter border controls have blocked foreign fighters from getting to Iraq and Syria, and persistent raids by U.S.-backed forces in both countries have largely pushed it out of the big cities and into the peripheries.
In Iraq, the group ramped up attacks in 2019 and 2020, but they have declined since then in both quantity and quality, according to an in-depth analysis of attack data published this month by Michael Knights, the Jill and Jay Bernstein Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, and his colleague, Alex Almeida.
Image
Credit…Diego Ibarra Sanchez for The New York Times
“For now, at the outset of 2022, the Islamic State insurgency in Iraq is at a very low ebb, with recorded attack numbers that rival the lowest ever recorded,” they wrote.
They cite a range of factors: a greater security presence in rural areas, thermal cameras that can detect militants moving at night, frequent security sweeps and a campaign of “decapitation strikes” against the group’s leaders.
The authors do not draw conclusions about the group’s future, but suggest that ISIS may be saving its resources until circumstances give it an opportunity to break out.
The group has passed through weak stretches before, the authors note, and has still managed to rebound.
Before it attacked the prison in Hasaka last week, ISIS in Syria was primarily operating in the country’s sparsely populated east, where its fighters sought refuge in the desert to plot attacks on Syrian government and Kurdish-led forces, according to analysts and local residents.
From 2018 to 2021, it stepped up a campaign of assassinations of local leaders and tribal figures, killing more than 200, according to a study by DeirEzzor24, an activist network.
More recently, it has extorted local businesses for cash, spread fliers against the U.S.-backed S.D.F. and carried out a string of attacks on isolated checkpoints that has caused some to be abandoned, said Dareen Khalifa, senior Syria analyst with the International Crisis Group.
“The reality is that it got worse in 2021, not because there were so many attacks on checkpoints, but there were enough attacks to make the internal security forces scared to man checkpoints,” she said.
Other factors have contributed to ISIS’ persistence, she said, citing the S.D.F.’s struggle to forge trusted relations with local residents in overwhelmingly Arab areas, porous borders, crushing poverty that makes it easier for the jihadists to smuggle weapons and people, and the area’s overall instability.
Image
Credit…Diego Ibarra Sanchez for The New York Times
Some sudden disruption, like financial problems for the S.D.F. and its affiliated administration, a new military incursion by Turkey similar to the one in 2019 or a precipitous withdrawal of the 700 U.S. troops based in the area to support the S.D.F., could give the jihadists an opening, Ms. Khalifa said.
“ISIS is a local insurgency, and might not be an imminent transnational risk,” she said. “But if there is a vacuum of some sort in Syria, this is where these movements really thrive. That is when it becomes more of an external threat.”
What ISIS has not been able to do since 2019 is control significant territory. The splashy operation in Hasaka, analysts said, does not change that.
“Contrary to popular opinion, that doesn’t move the needle much, and it doesn’t get them closer to re-establishing control over populations,” Mr. Whiteside said. That control, he said, is “their reason for being, why they call themselves ‘the State.’”
In neighborhoods around the prison on Saturday, American forces in armored fighting vehicles helped Kurdish special forces who were searching houses for ISIS fighters. Residents waiting to return home said Islamic State fighters had made their way through the neighborhood, jumping from rooftop to rooftop.
The prison attack was still one of ISIS’ most ambitious since 2018, and it should not have come as a great surprise.
The prison was in fact a converted training institute beefed up with bars and other fortifications, not an ideal lockup for thousands of former fighters from a group that has historically relied on prison breaks to replenish its ranks.
And it was a known target.
Last month, the S.D.F. media office released a video of a man identified as a captured ISIS commander, saying he had been responsible for planning a foiled attack involving two car bombs and a bunch of armed commandos.
Their goal? To storm the prison in Hasaka that ISIS seized last week.
Asmaa al-Omar contributed reporting from Beirut, Lebanon, Eric Schmitt from Washington and Jane Arraf from Hasaka, Syria.
nytimes.com
U.S. and Russia Discuss Ukraine at U.N.: Live Updates
Rick Gladstone, Anton Troianovski
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The U.S. confronts Russia at the U.N. over Ukraine.
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The meeting of the Security Council was requested by the United States in response to Russia’s buildup of military forces along Ukraine’s borders.CreditCredit…Sergey Pivovarov/Reuters
The United States and Russia confronted each other Monday at the United Nations Security Council over the Ukraine crisis, with the Americans vowing to make the Russians justify their massing of troops on Ukraine’s borders and Kremlin diplomats dismissing the meeting as farcical theatrics.
Almost immediately after the meeting of the 15-nation council convened the Russians objected to even holding it. Ambassador Vasily Nebenzia of Russia accused the Americans of fomenting “unfounded accusations that we have refuted” and said the meeting would not help “bring this council together.” He said no Russian troops were in Ukraine, questioning the basic premise of the meeting.
The American ambassador, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, countered that many private diplomatic meetings had been held about Russia’s military buildup and it was “now time to have a meeting in public.” She asked other members how they would feel “if you had 100,000 troops sitting on your border.”
The council voted to proceed with the meeting, with only Russia and China objecting.
“The situation we are facing in Europe is urgent and dangerous,” Ms. Thomas-Greenfield said in her opening remarks. “Russia’s actions strike at the very heart of the U.N. charter.”
The meeting of the council, requested by the United States last week, represents the highest-profile arena for the two powers to sway world opinion over Ukraine. The tensions surrounding the former Soviet republic have brought U.S.-Russian relations to their lowest point since the Cold War.
Note: Numbers for newly arrived troops to Belarus, parts of Crimea, and western Russia are rough estimates.
As one of the five permanent members of the council — along with Britain, China, France and the United States — Russia has the power to veto any decision by the majority. But veto power cannot be used to block a meeting.
Russian diplomats have ridiculed the meeting as part of a manufactured contretemps over what they call unjustified Western fears, instigated by the United States, that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia is preparing to invade Ukraine. The Russians have also seized on complaints by Ukraine’s president and others that the Americans are needlessly sowing panic.
Mr. Putin, who has not spoken publicly about Ukraine since December, maintained his silence.
His spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, told reporters on Monday that Mr. Putin would state his views on the situation “as soon as he determines it to be necessary.”
“I can’t give you an exact date,” Mr. Peskov said. Russian officials continued to maintain they were not at fault for the rising tensions, insisting that the United States was fabricating the threat of a Russian invasion of Ukraine.
That was a rare point of common ground with Kyiv, where President Volodymyr Zelensky has also blamed the United States for needlessly sowing “panic” in Ukraine.
“To our regret, the American news media has been publishing a great amount of unverified, distorted and deliberately false and provocative information about what is happening in Ukraine and around it in recent months,” Mr. Peskov said.
Russia has sent more than 100,000 troops to the Ukrainian border in recent weeks, part of an increasingly aggressive posture by Mr. Putin to protect and enlarge what he sees as Russia’s rightful sphere of influence in Eastern Europe. The Pentagon said on Friday that Russia had amassed enough forces to stage a full-scale invasion of Ukraine at a time of its choosing.
The Kremlin has accused the NATO alliance of threatening Russia and has demanded that it never admit Ukraine as a member. The possibility of a diplomatic solution has remained unclear at best.
Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, will have a phone call with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Tuesday, but there are no plans at the moment to arrange an in-person meeting, Maria V. Zakharova, the spokeswoman for the ministry, said on Monday.
The Biden administration has said it wants a peaceful outcome to the crisis but is preparing for the possibility of what American military commanders have said would be a devastating armed conflict in Ukraine. The administration has vowed to respond with crippling economic sanctions on Russia if it invades Ukraine.
Boris Johnson will speak with Putin today and visit Ukraine on Tuesday.
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Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia in 2020.
Credit…Alexei Nikolsky/Associated Press
LONDON — Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia will speak in a phone call on Monday, a day before Mr. Johnson makes a visit to Ukraine as his government attempts to defuse the escalating crisis with both diplomacy and deterrents.
Britain will propose legislation this week to let ministers impose a wider range of sanctions on Russia in the event of a new invasion of Ukraine, the British foreign secretary said on Sunday.
The foreign secretary, Liz Truss, discussed the plan in an interview with the broadcaster Sky News, presenting it as part of a broad range of efforts to deter further aggression from Mr. Putin. Britain is already supplying defensive weapons to Ukraine and has offered to increase its troop deployments elsewhere in Eastern Europe.
The offer to bolster troops was designed to “signal to Putin that the very thing he fears, that is, more NATO close to Russia, would be the consequence of invading Ukraine,” Ben Wallace, Britain’s defense minister, said on Monday during a visit to Hungary.
The new legislation would seek to broaden Britain’s current sanctions so there would be “nowhere to hide” for oligarchs and “any company of interest to the Kremlin and the regime in Russia,” Ms. Truss said.
Britain has long been a financial hub for Russia’s wealthy and well-connected, with one British parliamentary report describing London as a “laundromat” for illicit Russian money.
While the British Parliament typically takes weeks or months to pass a bill, emergency procedures allow it to legislate in as little as a day under some circumstances.
The call between the British and Russian leaders comes at a crucial moment for Mr. Johnson, whose political future remains uncertain after weeks of media reports that parties were hosted at Downing Street when the rest of the country was under lockdown restrictions.
Mr. Johnson’s visit to Ukraine on Tuesday will happen a day after a potentially explosive British government investigation into those reports was delivered to the prime minister.
A wave of bomb threats heightens an already tense mood in Ukraine.
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The Ukrainian police say they have checked more than 3,000 buildings since the beginning of January in response to more than 300 phoned-in bomb threats.
Credit…Brendan Hoffman for The New York Times
KYIV, Ukraine — A bomb is about to go off.
Callers have communicated some variation of those words to the police in Ukraine at least 300 times in the past month, a spate of fake bomb threats that officials say is designed to sow panic and fear.
With tens of thousands of Russian troops amassed at its borders and the West warning that war could break out any day, the bomb threats have added to the growing sense of anxiety in the nation of 44 million.
While the Pentagon warned on Friday that Russia had now amassed enough troops to launch a full-scale invasion of the country, analysts have said that Russian aggression aimed at destabilizing the government could come in many forms. And it is the collapse of the state from within — abetted by Russian efforts — that Ukrainian officials have called the most clear and present danger.
The rate of bomb threats in January in Ukraine was six times higher than the average for last year.
The Ukrainian police say they have checked more than 3,000 buildings since the beginning of January in response to more than 300 phoned-in bomb threats. So far the threats have all turned out to be fake — causing disruption but no damage or loss of life.
In a statement, the country’s security service said the goal was obvious: creating chaos, stirring fear and undermining the government.
The threats have been mostly aimed at schools and shopping malls, forcing evacuations and closures and in some cases keeping children out of classes for days.
Ukraine’s interior minister, Denys Monastyrsky, wrote on social media that the fake bomb alerts were mostly coming from Russia, from Russian-controlled territory in eastern Ukraine and from Russian allies, including Belarus.
The threats come as Ukraine braces for more cyberattacks — which could range from efforts to cripple the country’s infrastructure to propaganda campaigns aimed at sowing fear and confusion.
A Ukrainian government website was recently hacked and a message was posted: “Be afraid and expect the worst.”
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine has repeatedly expressed his concern that internal destabilization posed perhaps an even greater danger than an invasion. Panic, he has said, puts the economy in danger.
It is this concern that prompted him to publicly call on the United States and other European leaders to cool their talk of war being imminent. At the same time, he has blamed Russia for the bomb threats and efforts to cause turmoil within Ukraine.
“Why are you doing this?” Mr. Zelensky said at a news conference in comments directed at Russian President Vladimir V. Putin, in which he mentioned both the military buildup at the border and the flurry of bomb threats. “To threaten us? What is this sadomasochism? What is the pleasure of this? Of someone being afraid?”
Russian officials have repeatedly denied meddling in Ukraine’s internal affairs. And they say they have also been dealing with their own wave of bomb threats, which have forced Russian schools and shopping centers to evacuate tens of thousands of people. They have blamed Ukraine for the surge.
In Ukraine, the fake bomb alerts have disrupted classes at dozens of schools, and some Ukrainians are blaming the government for the problem.
“It’s getting scary,” said Anastasia Kuznetsova, a parent in Kryvyi Rih, a city in central Ukraine. Her 9-year-old daughter could not go to school for nearly two weeks this month because of repeated bomb threats to the building.
Olena Ronzhyna, mother of a 12-year-old from Cherkasy, in central Ukraine, said people were upset and blaming the government.
“Children have been home for almost a month,” she said.
Yet Ms. Ronzhyna believes that if Russia is hoping to damage Ukraine by undermining trust in its government, it will not work. Ukrainians have always taken great pride in their deep distrust of their government, and they relish criticizing it harshly and openly.
“We never trust any of our governments,” she said. “Starting from the first day after an election.”
— Maria Varenikova
Where the Ukraine standoff stands.
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A Ukrainian soldier at a checkpoint in Chermalyk, near the border with Russia, on Saturday.
Credit…Brendan Hoffman for The New York Times
More than a month of bluster and posturing, menacing military maneuvers and high-level diplomatic meetings has not made the security crisis gripping Europe any easier to assess.
Just a week after top diplomats from the United States and Russia sat down in Geneva on Jan. 21 to seek a way of de-escalating tensions around Ukraine, the Pentagon warned that Russia had amassed a fighting force large enough to attack its neighbor, a nation of 44 million, on a scale and at a time of its choosing. That could include a full-scale invasion, which would be likely to result in fierce fighting and potentially the worst bloodshed on the continent since the end of World War II.
“You can imagine what that might look like in dense urban areas, along roads and so on and so forth,” said Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on Friday. “It would be horrific. It would be terrible.”
The U.S. defense secretary, Lloyd J. Austin III, described an array of Russian infantry troops, artillery and rockets assembled at the Ukrainian border, which he said “far and away exceeds what we would typically see them do for exercises.”
Still, Mr. Austin said, “There is still time and space for diplomacy.”
No one is sure what Mr. Putin’s intentions are, and trying to divine them is at the heart of the uncertainty surrounding the crisis.
His spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, told reporters on Monday that Mr. Putin would state his views on the situation “as soon as he determines it to be necessary.”
“I can’t give you an exact date,” Mr. Peskov said.
Mr. Putin has not spoken in public about Ukraine since Dec. 23. During that time, the Biden administration has moved to rally Western nations to demonstrate that the cost of military aggression would be severe and swiftly felt.
Ukraine is not a member of NATO, and member nations are not bound to come to its defense, but the United States has placed 8,500 troops on high alert to be dispatched to Eastern Europe to support allies nervous that Russian aggression might not stop in Ukraine.
American officials also announced last week that they were making plans to impose sanctions on some of Russia’s largest financial institutions — penalties that could disrupt Russia’s economy in ways that would go far beyond previous Western actions.
The United States and Germany are also increasing their warnings that natural gas would not flow through a new $11 billion pipeline from Russia to Germany if Russia were to invade Ukraine.
Still, there is concern that Mr. Putin may be willing to pay a high price to bring Ukraine back into what he sees as Russia’s natural sphere of influence.
In July, he wrote a 5,000-word essay expanding on his frequently voiced conviction that Russians and Ukrainians were “one people.”
And at the center of the current maelstrom, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine sought on Friday to offer the perspective of a nation where conflict is not theoretical, but a daily reality.
About 14,000 people have been killed in the breakaway provinces in eastern Ukraine, Donetsk and Luhansk, where the Ukrainian military has been at war with Russia-backed separatists since 2014.
To speak of war as imminent was both wrong and dangerous, Mr. Zelensky said. It could result in economic and social instability that could itself cause the state to struggle to survive.
“We don’t need panic,” he said.
Russia masses forces in Belarus, near Ukraine’s lightly defended northern border.
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The E-95 highway from Chernihiv towards Kyiv.
Credit…Brendan Hoffman for The New York Times
NOVI YARYLOVYCHI BORDER CROSSING, Ukraine — On the other side of this border in northern Ukraine, not visible through the thick pine and birch forests that crowd the E-95 highway but noticeable to passing truckers, a force is gathering in Belarus more potent than anything seen in the country since the fall of the Soviet Union, officials and military analysts say.
Russia has deployed tanks and artillery, fighter jets and helicopters, advanced rocket systems and troops by the thousands all across Belarus, augmenting a fighting force that already envelopes Ukraine like a horseshoe on three sides. Russia says the troops have deployed for military exercises scheduled to commence next month, but the buildup in Belarus could presage an attack from a new vector, one in proximity to Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv.
With much of Ukraine’s military might concentrated in the country’s east — where a war with Russian-backed separatists has raged for eight years — military analysts and Ukraine’s own generals say it will be difficult for the country to muster the forces necessary to defend its northern border.
“As a result of Russia taking control over Belarus, 1,070 kilometers of our border with Belarus became a threat,” said Oleksii Reznikov, Ukraine’s defense minister, referring to a distance of about 665 miles. “This is not a threat from Belarus — Ukraine has a very warm attitude toward the Belarusian people — but a threat from Russia moving through Belarus.”
Russia calls off naval drills 150 miles from the Irish Coast.
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A guided-missile cruiser from the Russian Navy in the port of Sevastopol, Crimea, in November. Russia called off plans to conduct naval exercises next week in international waters off Ireland’s coast.
Credit…Alexey Pavlishak/Reuters
Russia turned down the temperature on another potential provocation in Western Europe on Saturday, backing out of a plan to conduct naval exercises next week in international waters off Ireland’s coast, which had drawn protests from Irish fishing groups and the Irish government.
The naval drills were set to take place 150 miles off Ireland’s southwest coast — outside its territorial waters but within Ireland’s exclusive economic zone, an area where the country has sovereign rights over marine resources.
Fishing groups raised concerns that the activity could disrupt marine life and jeopardize an important region for their trade. One organization had planned to peacefully protest the exercises.
Ireland’s foreign minister, Simon Coveney, described the proposed drills in an interview last week with the Irish public broadcaster RTE as “simply not welcome and not wanted right now.”
While acknowledging that Russia’s plans did not breach the international law of the sea, he said in a statement that his department had raised several concerns with the Russian authorities “in light of the current political and security environment in Europe.”
Moscow then decided to move the exercises outside the Irish exclusive economic zone “as a gesture of good will,” the Russian ambassador to Ireland, Yuriy Filatov, said in a statement released on Saturday. Mr. Coveney said on Twitter that he welcomed Russia’s response.
The U.S. military has noted signs that Russia and its proxies are stirring up discord and confusion far from Ukraine to distract the United States and its European partners.
Russian surveillance aircraft last week flew near Al Tanf, a military outpost in Syria near the Jordanian border where some 200 American troops are training allied Syrian militia members. Two Russian warships are in the Red Sea waiting to steam into the eastern Mediterranean, where an American aircraft carrier is conducting a naval exercise.
In West Africa’s Sahel region, supporters of a military coup in Burkina Faso took to the streets this week waving Russian flags, showing their desire to pivot away from France, the former colonial power, and toward Moscow.
French officials suggested that the Russian Embassy may have paid the supporters to wave flags, as the Russians have done in Mali, a country north of Burkina Faso that recently signed a deal to bring in several hundred Russian mercenaries to help combat a growing Islamist insurgency there. France and several other European countries operating in Mali have strenuously opposed the country’s plan to recruit mercenaries from the Wagner Group, a Kremlin-linked firm.
Russia says it wants more clarity from NATO on its intentions in Eastern Europe.
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NATO flag during a political rally at Independence Square in Kyiv, Ukraine, on Sunday.
Credit…Valentyn Ogirenko/Reuters
KYIV, Ukraine — Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, said Sunday that Russia would seek clarity from NATO on its intentions to follow through with certain Kremlin requests to alter its approach to security, days after the United States and its allies delivered a formal rejection to Moscow’s demands NATO retreat from Eastern Europe and bar Ukraine from joining the alliance.
Mr. Lavrov’s statement, delivered in an interview with Russia’s main government television channel, indicated that while Moscow was displeased with the Western responses, as expected, there was still some flicker of hope for further diplomacy.
Through the foreign ministry, Mr. Lavrov said, an official request was sent Sunday to both NATO and the Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe, a European security alliance of which Russia is a member, “with an urgent demand to explain how they intend to fulfill their obligation not to strengthen their security at the expense of the security of others.”
“If they do not intend to, then they must explain why,” he added. “This will be the key question in determining our further proposals, which we will report to Russia’s president,” he said.
While Mr. Lavrov did not indicate what specific issue in the NATO responses was unclear, the Kremlin has been highly critical of NATO’s so-called open-door policy of granting membership to former Communist bloc countries without taking Russia’s security concerns into account. In his remarks Sunday, Mr. Lavrov reiterated a frequent Kremlin complaint that NATO in the years since the Soviet collapse had crept ever closer to Russia’s border.
“Now they’ve come up to Ukraine, and they want to drag that country in,” he said. “Though everyone understands that Ukraine is not ready and will make no contribution to strengthening NATO security.”
Though Ukraine has been promised a path to NATO membership, Western officials openly acknowledge that the country is years away from membership. But even with roughly 130,000 Russian troops parked on the border with Ukraine and Moscow threatening unspecified “military-technical” measures should its demands not be met, neither the United States nor NATO has budged in its contention that any country that wishes to join can do so if it meets the requirements, no matter Russia’s objections.
While the United States and its allies have rejected the core of Russia’s demands, they have offered second-tier proposals meant to lower the temperature that Moscow has indicated it would be open to discussing.
In remarks last week, Mr. Lavrov was largely dismissive of the American and NATO responses to its demands, which were delivered in writing as requested by the Kremlin to the foreign ministry last week. But he said some proposals “contained kernels of rationality,” like limitations on short and medium range missiles.
‘We are afraid of everything’: A frontline city recalls a deadly attack amid fears of an invasion.
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Residents in Mariupol, a Ukrainian frontline city rocked by shelling in 2015, mourn the dead as they brace for a potential Russian escalation.CreditCredit…Yousur Al-Hlou/The New York Times
MARIUPOL, Ukraine — Residents in this frontline port city observed a moment of silence last week for those killed by rocket fire there seven years ago.
The shelling, on Jan. 24, 2015, killed 30 people, nearly all civilians, and wounded more than 100, according to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. The group traced at least 19 rockets to separatist-controlled territory. Mariupol is 14 miles of the front line of a conflict between Ukraine and Russia-backed separatists that continues today.
“We witnessed it all,” said Natalia Nikolaevna, a 68-year-old resident of Mariupol. “My husband had a cut in his leg. I had shrapnel in my head,” she said, recalling the rocket attack.
“My soul is crying,” she added. “We are afraid of everything now.”
As fears of an escalation with Russia intensify, soldiers at a memorial ceremony — who have for years fought in the continuing conflict with Russia-backed separatists — resolved to defend the city if it comes to that.
“You see what’s happening at the border now? We’re getting ready,” said Volodymyr, a Ukrainian Marine commander who asked that his full name be withheld for security reasons. “But I think Ukraine will prevail.”
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/01/31/world/ukraine-russia-us